Fragility of the provision of local public goods to private and collective risks

Abstract

Smallholder agricultural systems, strongly dependent on water resources and investments in shared infrastructure, make a significant contribution to food security in developing countries. These communities are being increasingly integrated into the global economy and are exposed to new global climate-related risks that may affect their willingness to cooperate in community-level collective action problems. We performed field experiments on public goods with private and collective risks in 118 small-scale rice-producing communities in four countries. Our results indicate that increasing the integration of those communities with the broader economic system is associated with lower investments in public goods when facing collective risks. These findings indicate that local public good provision may be negatively affected by collective risks, especially in communities more integrated with the market economy.framed field experiments | commons | irrigation | public goods | risk

Cooperation in a risky world

“…Second, our study contributes to the recent experimental investigations of the effects of environmental randomness on the provision of public goods. Together with the recent studies by Levati and Morone (), Boulu‐Reshef et al (), and Björk et al () (but notwithstanding Cárdenas et al, ; Levati et al, ), the results of our experiment point to the robustness of the standard patterns of cooperation not only across different domains of (noncompetitive) risk but also across different domains of (noncompetitive) randomness: risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty.…”

“…A similar phenomenon has been recently documented by Björk et al () in both one‐shot and repeated games. In contrast, a lab‐in‐the‐field experiment conducted in small rural communities by Cárdenas et al () reveals a negative effect of what we call HetR (i.e., each player's MPCR is random and independently determined) on cooperation. Finally, Fischbacher et al () introduce another type of environmental risk by allowing MPCR to vary within a group according to a publicly known distribution.…”

“…Although our experiment offers the first direct investigation of cooperation under different environmental risks, an indirect inference from the existing data suggests that HomR may yield higher contribution levels than HetR. Recent results from Levati and Morone (), Björk et al (), and Cárdenas et al () jointly suggest that homogeneous (heterogeneous) risk does not change contributions (undercuts contributions) as compared with the standard VCM game (see Section ).…”

Modeling the decline of labor-sharing in the semi-desert region of Chile

“…Our results also illustrate how external economic opportunities driven by global markets can influence the participation of farmers in cooperative institutions (Cárdenas et al 2017). Access to other sources of income and more information can influence the perception that young people have of the prospect of living in rural areas, thereby incentivizing rural-urban emigration patterns.…”

Interactions of social, natural, and technological subsystems and synergy between development and adaptation to floods around Poyang Lake

“…As discussed earlier, agricultural support policies together with low lake levels in the past years have encouraged rice intensification within flood storage polders in PLR. As rural households in the developing world progressively participate in urban and broader economies, nonfarm work may divert labour away from villages and discourage collective actions that are needed for building and maintaining local infrastructure (Baker 1997;Cardenas et al 2017). In PLR, for example, nonfarm work and income contributes to collapse of collective irrigation systems; in seven out of eight surveyed villages, the collective irrigation system built in Mao's time has stopped functioning.…”